Friday, November 9, 2012

Players' percentage of team shots

One of the factors that goes into the player model is the percentage of shots each player takes, split between those taken inside and outside the box and whether they were at home or away. Given their correlation to goals, I'm going to focus on shots inside the box (SiB), though if anyone's interested I could post the shots outside the box (SoB) data too. Scroll down for some observations . . .

First, a quick note on the methodology. The sharper reader will note that some teams' totals don't add up to, and often exceed 100%. The reason is because I don't have data for when each shot was taken so if a player plays 45 minutes I simply use the total shots for the game divided by two as the denominator to work out his share. It's a crude solution but I think over a season it won't particularly pollute the results. Over a couple of games though (as is the case with Benteke) it can lead to outliers.

Giroud has been getting a bit of attention of late and these charts should underline his potential. Podolski is a very good player and I think his ability to contribute in reality has been a touch undervalued, but from a fantasy perspective Giroud is clearly the developing option here and is probably one of two legitimate Arsenal attacking players worth owning (with Cazorla).

Van Persie's home data is pretty surprising and might give caution to to those labelling the Dutchman as a must own asset. In United's five home games he's added one, one, two, one and four shots inside the box despite facing a couple of opponents who one would expect greater success against. It's probably nothing to worry about but it's worth keeping in the back of your mind before handing out the armband to van Persie without a second thought.

If Steve Clark is reading this, perhaps he'll start giving the uber-talented Lukaku a few more minutes. Now, part of Lukaku's high percentage is because West Brom haven't been a particularly dangerous team so even a couple of shots allows you to rank highly here. But, even so, he's managed to notch three SiB four times and two SiB in every appearance bar one, despite only getting a handful a minutes in most of those games. His ceiling remains sky high if only he'd be given a shot.

I took some stick for my (well, the model's) pick of Aguero over Tevez, and while I'm not drawing any conclusions based on one abstract piece of data, you can at least see where the model is coming from given the above. Tevez simply hasn't been effective away from home, despite City generally being as strong as at the Etihad.